The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTBioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.
Even with advanced depth of field effects, our highest end video cards are starting to run away with Bioshock: Infinite. That is particularly true for the GTX 980, which in a game that NVIDIA frequently does well in further props up the GTX 980’s advantage. Only at 4K are the R9 290XU and GTX 980 anywhere near close, otherwise at 1440p it’s a 37% performance advantage. GTX 780 Ti on the other hand holds much closer, still falling behind the GTX 980 but only by around 5% at sub-4K resolutions. This does make for a good moment for showcasing the GTX 980’s greater ROP throughput though; as we crank up the resolution to 4K, the 780 Ti falls further behind, especially when we’re at lower quality settings that leave us less shader-bound.
On an absolute basis 120Hz/144Hz gamer should have a blast even with a single GTX 980 at 1080p, while purists will need more performance for 1440p than the 85fps the card can offer. And at 4K the GTX 980 is doing very well for itself, almost cracking 60fps at High quality, and becoming the only card to crack 40fps with Ultra quality.
This will be one of the weaker showings for the GTX 980 over the GTX 680 though; at sub-4K resolutions it’s only a 60-65% performance improvement.
Meanwhile Bioshock is the first of 5 games we can reliably measure with the FCAT tools to check for frame pacing consistency. Bioshock is a bit more erratic than most games in this respect, and while our general rule of thumb for an excellent performance from a single card is 3%, our recording for GTX 980 is a bit higher at 3.5%. On the other hand at 4K it measures in at just 2.3%. So while frame pacing is going to be a bit of a rubber stamping process overall, we can confirm that GTX 980 is delivering a good frame pacing experience in Bioshock.
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jmunjr - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Wish you had done a GTX 970 review as well like many other sites since way more of us care about that card than the 980 since it is cheaper.Gonemad - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Apparently, if I want to run anything under the sun in 1080p cranked to full at 60fps, I will need to get me one GTX 980 and a suitable system to run with it, and forget mid-ranged priced cards.That should put an huge hole in my wallet.
Oh yes, the others can run stuff at 1080p, but you have to keep tweaking drivers, turning AA on, turning AA off, what a chore. And the milennar joke, yes it RUNS Crysis, at the resolution I'd like.
Didn't, by any chance, the card actually benefit of being fabricated at 28nm, by spreading its heat over a larger area? If the whole thing, hipothetically, just shrunk to 14nm, wouldn't all that 165W of power would be dissipated over a smaller area (1/4 area?), and this thing would hit the throttle and stay there?
Or by being made smaller, it would actually dissipate even less heat and still get faster?
Yojimbo - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I think that it depends on the process. If Dennard scaling were to be in effect, then it should dissipate proportionally less heat. But to my understanding, Dennard scaling has broken down somewhat in recent years, and so I think heat density could be a concern. However, I don't know if it would be accurate to say that the chip benefited from the 28nm process, since I think it was originally designed with the 20nm process in mind, and the problem with putting the chip on that process had to do with the cost and yields. So, presumably, the heat dissipation issues were already worked out for that process..?AnnonymousCoward - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
The die size doesn't really matter for heat dissipation when the external heat sink is the same size; the thermal resistance from die to heat sink would be similar.danjw - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I would love to see these built on Intel's 14nm process or even the 22nm. I think both Nvidia and AMD aren't comfortable letting Intel look at their technology, despite NDAs and firewalls that would be a part of any such agreement.Anyway, thanks for the great review Ryan.
Yojimbo - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Well, if one goes by Jen-Hsun Huang's (Nvidia's CEO) comments of a year or two ago, Nvidia would have liked Intel to manufacture their SOCs for them, but it seems Intel was unwilling. I don't see why they would be willing to have them manufacture SOCs and not GPUs being that at that time they must have already had the plan to put their desktop GPU technology into their SOCs, unless the one year delay between the parts makes a difference.r13j13r13 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
hasta que no salga la serie 300 de AMD con soporte nativo para directx 12Arakageeta - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
No interpretation of the compute graphs whatsoever? Could you at least report the output of CUDA's deviceQuery tool?texasti89 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I'm truly impressed with this new line of GPUs. To be able to acheive this leap on efficiency using the same transistor feature size is a great incremental achievement. Bravo TSMC & Nvidia. I feel comfortable to think that we will soon get this amazing 980 performance level on game laptops once we scale technology to the 10nm process. Keep up the great work.stateofstatic - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Spoiler alert: Intel is building a new fab in Hillsboro, OR specifically for this purpose...